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DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC, in VOA Special English.
This is Doug Johnson. On our show this week:
New music by John Fogerty …
A question from China about Thanksgiving …
And a way to make friends online.
Friendster
Social networking has become popular on the Internet. A networkis a system of connections. The idea of social networking is toconnect people. And, as Faith Lapidus reports, one way many peopledo that is through friendster.com.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Jonathan Abrams began Friendster in two thousandtwo. Last year, investors put fourteen million dollars into hiscompany in Silicon Valley, California.
Mister Abrams thought of a way for people to meet on the Web.Friendster links not only friends but also friends of friends. Itshows people how they are connected. Friendster is a free servicethat sells advertising. The company says thirteen million peoplehave joined.
There are two ways to begin creating a social network onFriendster. One way is to receive an e-mail invitation from a friendalready on the service. The second way is to sign up atfriendster.com. Once registered, users must describe themselves.They list things like their location, schools they attended, andfavorite books and movies. They can also add pictures to theirprofile.
When their profile is complete, users can search other profilesto find some sort of connection to other people. Users may leavemessages for each other.
Some people use Friendster to renew old friendships. Others makenew friends, or use the site as an online dating service.
Friendster has been especially popular among college students.Many use it to reconnect with old classmates. Jennifer is a studentat American University in Washington, D.C. She says Friendster hashelped her keep in touch with her high school friends. In fact, shehas even found some of her friends from elementary school.
But Friendster is not for everyone. A forty-three-year-old lawyerin Washington says people his age were not on the social networkhomepage. He had no luck finding anyone he knew. Instead, he says hewill leave it to his two children to use Friendster.
The site has added a bulletin board where friends can shareannouncements. People can also receive a reminder when a friend ishaving a birthday.
Friendster calls itself “the fun and safe way to organize yoursocial life.” So now people have a new way to make friends — or, inthis case, “friendsters.”
Two Thanksgivings
HOST:
Our listener question this week comes from Fujian, China. ChunfuZheng asks about the difference between Thanksgiving in the UnitedStates and Canada.
Americans celebrate Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday inNovember. Canadians celebrate their Thanksgiving holiday on thesecond Monday in October.
There are stories that the English explorer Martin Frobisher heldthe first Thanksgiving celebration in Canada in fifteenseventy-eight. But a researcher at York University in Toronto foundthat these stories are false.
Peter Stevens gives credit for the holiday to ProtestantChristian leaders in Ontario province in the nineteen century.Mister Stevens says they took the idea of the American celebrationand created a version for Canada, although they did not just copyit.
He says the observance became an expression of Canadiannationalism. He says it lost its Protestant religious meaning in theearly twentieth century, and Canadians created their own traditions.The government established the holiday in October because it wasearly enough in the year for people to spend the day outdoors.
Thanksgiving in the United States developed from a celebration ofEnglish settlers known as Pilgrims. They are believed to have heldthe first Thanksgiving meal in sixteen twenty-one. They had arrivedin what is now the northeastern United States a year earlier. Soon,more than half had died of disease or lack of food.
Those who survived thanked God. They also thanked the NativeAmericans who showed them how to fish and plant crops. The Pilgrimsand the Indians celebrated together for about three days. Within afew years, though, the Indians and the growing number of settlerswere at war.
Today a Thanksgiving celebration might last three hours.Americans traditionally prepare some of the same foods eaten at thatfirst Thanksgiving. This includes turkey, sweet potatoes, squash,corn, cranberries and pumpkin pie. And this is similar to whatCanadians eat on their day for giving thanks.
John Fogerty’s New Album
DOUG JOHNSON: Creedence Clearwater Revival was a band with hitslike this one from nineteen sixty-nine, “Proud Mary.”
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Singer John Fogerty led Creedence Clearwater Revival and wrotemany of its songs. The band broke up in nineteen seventy-two. Sincethen, John Fogerty has been working alone. Now, Shep O’Neal tells usabout his newest album.
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The album is called “Deja Vu All Over Again.” Deja vu is a Frenchexpression. It means experiencing something that you feel you haveexperienced before. The title song is a commentary on the VietnamWar and, now, the war in Iraq.
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But the album is not all about sadness and war. The songs mix allkinds of music: rock, folk, country, bluegrass and punk. In fact,John Fogerty says the album shows how happy he is these days.
We leave you with one of those happy songs from John Fogerty’snewest album. This one is called “Sugar-Sugar (In My Life.)”
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DOUG JOHNSON: This is Doug Johnson. I hope you enjoyed AMERICANMOSAIC.
This program was written by Brian Kim and Nancy Steinbach. PaulThompson was the producer. And our engineer was Efeem Drucker.
Send your questions about American life to mosaic@voanews.com. Besure to include your full name and postal address. Or write toAmerican Mosaic, VOA Special English, Washington, D.C.,two-zero-two-three-seven, USA.
Join us again next week for AMERICAN MOSAIC, VOA’s radio magazinein Special English.